Microsoft Releases Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 1

Microsoft is releasing the Beta 1 version of Visual Studio LightSwitch today. This product is a new addition to the Visual Studio family that enables developers of all skill level and organizational size to easily build business applications that target the desktop, cloud and Web. Here's some info from Jason Zander's blog:

When we introduced LightSwitch earlier this month we promised a broadly available beta of the product on 8/23. I’m happy to announce that LightSwitch Beta 1 is now available for download. I’ve included a detailed walk through (including setup instructions) to help you get your first LightSwitch application up and running. Before we do that, I want to answer a few of the most common questions I’ve been asked about the product.

Who Should Use LightSwitch?

LightSwitch is primarily targeted at developers who need to rapidly product business applications. It is part of the Visual Studio family and when you get into writing code you are in the VS IDE. At the same time we have found that most line of business applications follow a standard pattern (see Architecture below) and LightSwitch is optimized for helping you leverage those patterns.

Our goal with LightSwitch is to help you rapidly produce line of business applications by optimizing for the most common application patterns (data + screens + code). LightSwitch allows you to create desktop applications (the default) or browser applications.

Discuss this Article 3

sounds like an excellent addition to an already excellent line of development tools for us C# developers. This is one area I think Apple could learn a ton from Microsoft on..... decent development tools

Someone needs to rethink programming for the masses. Software development is anything but easy, what with complicated syntax and coding conventions. I'd like to see more point-and-click and drag-and-drop options for building applications. C-based programming models may be powerful, but with so many variations with differences that can throw off even the most seasoned developer, it's not something that someone can master in a short amount of time. There needs to be something better. Readability of code needs to improve drastically too. There are too many shortcuts now, that code is getting more complicated to figure out. In my school of reasoning, it's the compiler that should be doing the optimizations and the developer shouldn't have to burden themselves with that issue.

@Waethorn
Let them use something along the lines of ACCESS. you can do lots of front ends in access using built in commands and recorded macros.
Code readability is only as good as the developer that writes the code. Fact is that software today is extremely complex. I can write the app I work on as a single tier web app quickly and easily, that fact that I am required to use 3 tiers makes it much much much more difficult.
Most people I know who want to dabble in development with tools like you describe are never happy with their result (slow, limited etc....)
go back to the days of people using frontpage and considering themselves web developers.........